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Onaiza Drabu on Kashmiri Storytelling: How Everyday Conversation Carries Stories

Onaiza Drabu argues that storytelling in Kashmir may not be treated as a formal tradition, yet stories shape everyday communication. Her account explores dapaan, oral culture, and the making of her folklore collection.
Opened Runtime3 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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Onaiza Drabu’s point is not that Kashmir lacks stories. In a 2020 interview, she distinguishes storytelling as a named or staged tradition from the way stories move through ordinary conversation: “the way we talk, the way we communicate is all in stories.” Her account makes everyday speech—not a formal performance—the place to look for Kashmiri oral culture.

Is storytelling a tradition in Kashmir?

In her interview with Scroll.in, published April 19, 2020, Drabu describes an apparent contradiction. Ask people about “the tradition of storytelling,” she says, and they may not recognize it as a distinct practice. Yet, in her words, “the way we talk, the way we communicate is all in stories.”

She puts the distinction plainly: “So storytelling forms a very big part of the everyday without it being consciously a part.” In this account, stories are woven into how people communicate rather than set apart as a performance people attend. This is Drabu’s interpretation and experience, not a survey of every Kashmiri community or a claim that storytelling takes the same form everywhere.

What “dapaan” says about oral storytelling

Drabu explains dapaan as “it is said,” a familiar way to introduce a story, a fact, or a myth in Kashmiri speech. The phrase can carry rumor and hearsay as well as conversation. It signals that something is being passed along, without requiring a formal storyteller or a designated storytelling occasion.

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That small expression helps clarify her broader argument: oral culture can be present in everyday language even when people do not identify it as a separate tradition. A story may arrive as something heard, repeated, or shared in conversation.

How Drabu gathered and retold the stories

Drabu traced her work to a project she began in 2014 on Kashmiri history, heritage, and folklore. The book project took shape in 2017. She said she then spent about six months researching in libraries in Kashmir and speaking with older academics, writers, members of cultural academies, and traditional storytellers.

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She described the resulting collection as containing roughly 150 stories drawn from varied sources and voices. That figure is Drabu’s account of her book project in the 2020 interview, not an independently audited count of Kashmiri stories.

Retelling is not the same as direct translation

Drabu distinguishes her approach from direct translation. She says she tries to retain a teller’s voice while recognizing that the reteller’s voice also enters the work. She describes herself less as the sole creator than as a curator: someone who selects and shapes stories that belong to a collective tradition.

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That distinction matters. A written collection makes stories accessible in a new form, but it also involves choices about which accounts to include, how to shape them, and whose voice readers encounter. Drabu’s description presents preservation as an act of mediation rather than a claim to capture an untouched tradition.

Why Drabu wrote in English

Drabu said she wrote the retellings in English because it was the language in which she felt most comfortable. She also described learning to read and write Kashmiri during the research process, having not learned it at school while growing up.

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In the interview, she spoke about the scarcity and limited circulation of older Kashmiri-language materials, and the difficulty readers can face in accessing them. These are her personal experience and observations; they should not be read as a complete account of language education or publishing across Kashmir.

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Where to start reading

For readers interested in the folklore discussed in the interview, Drabu’s collection is The Legend of Himal and Nagrai and Other Stories. It presents the retellings she described as emerging from research, conversations, and multiple tellers.

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Drabu later edited The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature, a broader anthology. Penguin Random House India describes it as an introduction to Kashmiri literary culture and notes its connection to oral tradition. The anthology and the folklore collection serve different purposes: one gathers retold stories, while the other offers a wider literary selection.

Sources

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